A short video to help teaching of production possibility curves.

Teaching PPC’s can be a little dry with (to my knowledge) not a lot of media resources to support it. And some of my students struggle with the distinction between an increase in efficiency which moves the point closer the frontier and an increase in the frontier itself. This short 30 second video clip can be used to help them understand the difference.

I draw the two curves below on the board and then show them the youtube clip of the workers filling in the digger’s bucket. I then ask them to explain to me which graph represents what would happen if the workers figured out how to work it properly - they get the idea that there is no increase in the maximum production, but that the output can move towards the maximum production level. They can then appreciate that the shift outwards would occur when the digger is first delivered.

And then, just for fun, I put this picture up and award a small prize to the first student who can name the world’s most famous digger!

The video is also useful for a number of business concepts which I have posted to the Business Studies blog - see motivation, training, and productivity.